This seems like wishcasting. More likely, they’re watching their own back by getting orders in writing when possible. If the noose ever starts to close, all truly incriminating official records will be destroyed just like Berlin in 1945. It will be their word against anyone else’s.

If anything this is groundbreaking evidence that destabilizing an international rival is safe, easy and profitable. The rest of the world isn’t going to hold hands and sing kumbaya, every country is now in an arms race to root out their own instability and isolate themselves.

We’re headed back to the late 19th century. Say goodbye to soft power, simmering rivalries and large scale international cooperation. Every nation will have its own strong man and/or Palantir-style surveillance. Alliances will turn on a dime, your oldest friend could be your biggest threat in under a decade.

International mistrust now abounds at a time where cooperation is the only way to prop up our failing biosphere. All hard won rights and freedoms in the last 200 years will be quietly clawed back. Anyone cheering for this is a fool.

None of that has mattered or will matter to the administration. It’s becoming very obvious that they decide the crime, criminals and punishment (in any order they please). Legal precedent, clear constitutional rights and established jurisdiction don’t mean anything. Whatever rulings they don’t want will be thrown out and the ones they keep will be grist for the fascist mill.

The only thing the judge can do here is release a soundbite that makes it clear the actions that continue are in violation of the court order. Legalese is not that, no matter how technically correct.

unless reasonable suspicion that the person is […] in violation of U.S. immigration law

Ah so this is another powderpuff order to be ignored. Why not just say “has concrete evidence”? Don’t want to make it too obvious the house of cards has already collapsed when they completely ignore you?

I wonder how chicory (and optional caffeine pill?) emissions stack up against the coffee equivalent. It’s close enough to coffee for me 🤷

Are there any insights on what the policy implications of new leadership might be? Or is it less a factional takeover and more a “meet the new manager”?

It’s still a fine needle to thread. No matter the reason, loyalty is being sacrificed for competency. Lose too much loyalty and you lose control completely.

We’ve been in a pseudo-birth strike for decades, kids have been increasingly expensive as real wages dropped. The only thing it’s gotten us is regressive assaults on reproductive rights.

That makes no difference to their budget. They can still spend what they want, maybe with a little extra inflation, and they still balance their books anyway. The only thing they miss is that free couple hundred dollar loan from the 65%-ish that over withhold.

A government doesn’t need fiat currency, they just need to control the flow of it in/out of the economy. Sitting on your taxes is as good as paying them. Also, income tax is 48% of revenue and ~30% is paid by the top 5% of earners. I don’t think a 6 month delay on <18% of revenue would be noticeable.

Am I high or is everyone in this thread just ignoring that the IRS can garnish your wages and put levies on your accounts?

Unless everyone triggers a bank run to get their dollars into coffee cans, taking what you owe is as simple as a few key strokes.

My head is spinning from how fast we pivot from jokes about American “freedom” invasions to full throated support of Chinese freedom invasions

It’s not uncommon for a donor to support both candidates because whoever wins will have a debt. Like you said this is peanuts to them.

The other factor is non-monetary support. A $1 billion check to a candidate’s campaign fund has a lot of red tape. It isn’t as effecient as a $100 million donation and $900 million spent blasting propaganda across your personal media empire.

This is bad because it means if you want to run for office, your campaign is mostly floated by this tiny group of people. $5.5 billion sounds small until you realize that breaks out into millions of dollars for any individual campaign. Unless you’re rich enough to ante up (and repeat that every election cycle), you’ll never play the game.

More isn’t spent because it doesn’t need to be, not because it isn’t effective. The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other? Regardless of the raw number, the average politician has to equally weigh their representation between the needs of the 0.01% and the 99.99%.

That’s the secret with a starve the beast tactic. Either your funding cuts don’t impact performance so you can claim there was bloat or your cuts ruin the program so you can say it needs to be dismantled.

Waiting for the handful of weird Maga trolls on here to comment. It’s always funny to see them argue “Commander in Chief” means unlimited authority to do anything with the military.

Pretty obvious you have no fucking clue how the American political system works or any idea what daily life is like.

Half of Americans have less than $500 in savings and something like 30-40% have insecure housing. There’s no social safety net if you lose your job; political activism can easily spiral you (and any dependants) to an early grave. Transportation is incredibly expensive in both time and money, just getting to an urban area for a critical mass movement is quite literally more than people can do.

So that’s how you end up with one of the top 2-3 largest protests in US history being on a weekend and distributed over thousands of cities. And you’re right, concentrating that in Washington DC would be much more impactful. But is it reasonable to expect people to give up their livelihood and stop supporting their family to do that? To throw away everything they have in their lives just by trying?

If you think the answer is yes, that’s perfectly valid. But consider this: if you live in a major city in Central America or western Europe or Canada you could get to DC easier and faster (and possibly cheaper) than the majority of people in the US. Why aren’t you on a plane right now? Oh right, because you’re exactly like your American strawman: you don’t give a shit about stopping fascism.

20k attended? Damn, they could have just given everybody $2000 and skipped the $40m parade. I’m sure people would have enjoyed it more.

They can, but the limits of probable cause and the definition of “plain sight” become much more fuzzy when CBP can legally wander almost anywhere (that doesn’t directly house a bed) or search any vehicle. It’s harder for a cop to make those arguments from the sidewalk.

As a federal agency, their procedures also have national security/emergency carve outs. How far the administration can stretch all of this is an open question, but they probably have the tools to argue it. At least that’s my interpretation, but I’m not an immigration lawyer.

How many trillions of neuron firings and chemical reactions are taking place for my machine to produce an output? Where are these taking place and how do these regions interact? What are the rules for storing and reshaping memory in response to stimulus? How many bytes of information would it take to describe and simulate all of these systems together?

The human brain alone has the capacity for about 2.5PB of data. Our sensory systems feed data at a rate of about 10⁹ bits/s. The entire English language, compressed, is about 30MB. I can download and run an LLM with just a few GB. Even the largest context windows are still well under 1GB of data.

Just because two things both find and reproduce patterns does not mean they are equivalent. Saying language and biological organisms both use “bytes” is just about as useful as saying the entire universe is “bytes”; it doesn’t really mean anything.

Thanks for the clarification above, but there are still cases where a warrant isn’t needed to search. CBP is allowed to wander around any private property, which makes it easy to cook up an excuse for a warrantless emergency search.

Eg: we believed the evil brown person was inside with a gun because we saw something glint in an obscured window from the back yard. Nobody can argue the legality of this because the guy is already on a plane to another country via accelerated deportation rules.